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Autism
Background From very early on, my sense of social order was somewhat at odds with that of my peers’. I spent the first few years of my life at home reading, playing word games and, as the youngest member of my family, socialising with adults. When I began reception, it wasn’t long before my teacher told my parents how the other students were struggling with me – she felt they thought it was “like having a miniature adult in the room with them”. 18 years later, I received an autism diagnosis. Autism is a type of pervasive developmental disorder (PDD)Child Autism UK - releasing potential (2017) What is PDD? - Child Autism UK - releasing potential. online Available at: http://www.childautism.org.uk/about-autism/what-is-pdd/ 10 May 2017. which affects individuals in many ways. Perhaps the trait most commonly recognised by laypeople is an impairment in "receptive or expressive language as used in social communication" (World Health Organisation, 1993:147World Health Organization. (1993) International classification of diseases: Diagnostic criteria for research (10th Ed.). Geneva, Switzerland.). A common train amongst autistic individuals is that of inappropriate language – not rudeness, but simply a mismatch between situations and speech. Autistic people can very often have trouble making inferences in social situations or 'reading between the lines' of speech actsSearle, J.R. (1969) Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge university press. leading to ostensibly 'odd' language. Why, then, have I chosen to study interaction? As someone whose perception of the social world has always been somewhat confusing, why have I moved away from the predictable comfort of grammar, and immersed myself fully in the context-dependent world of social communication? For the same reason that we travelled to the moon. For the same reason that we continue to explore the oceans. For the same reason that you and I likely choose to study anything we don't understand – because [[Understanding|we want to understand]]. (In)Appropriacy Nursery I went to nursery for four days, most of which I spent lying on the floor, crying and screaming, thinking the world was coming to an end. My nursery teacher alerted my parents to the fact that I simply wouldn’t settle in, to which they responded by taking me out of nursery – but not before I had chance to say to my teacher “thank you for having me, but I won’t be coming back”. Primary School One Wednesday afternoon in 2004, nine-year-old-I politely raised my hand in swimming class and waited patiently to be noticed. When called upon, I stoically stated, “excuse me, but I’m not going to do anything if you’re going to be a cow like that.” My teacher asked me to repeat myself. So I repeated it. Verbatim. I very obviously had a sense of right and wrong when I was 9, that much is clear, but it appeared to me that I simply hadn’t got the memo about universal social etiquette that everyone else seemed to just get. But I raised my hand, I waited until my turn, I said “excuse me”, and I said it again when she asked me to! '' I thought to myself. All very polite things in and of themselves, you might agree. But, of course, what I actually ''did was terribly inappropriate and you can probably understand why I was sent out of class. What these two examples demonstrate is the mismatch between setting and language I mentioned earlier and a certain social naïvety. During my swimming lesson, I displayed an awareness of turn-taking and repair (by waiting to be called upon and repeating myself when asked) and politeness strategies (by raising my hand and saying excuse me). But the actual content of what I said created a huge juxtaposition. It is only recently that am I realising just how differently I interpret the world from my peers, and with that realisation has come a flurry of thoughts and feelings. For instance, it was only this past year that I discovered how entertaining television can be when I have someone there to explain character motives to me. Having spent the past year thrilled about what I can understand with a little extra help, the simple activity of watching a film with friends regularly becomes an interactional obstacle course. I now know that I regularly miss important interactional nuances that are glaringly obvious to my friends, but run the risk of ruining their experience by constantly asking. Diagnosis In 2014, during the latter half of a module titled Semantics and Pragmatics, I was introduced to the notion of implicature. From there, I discovered semantic-pragmatic disorderBishop, D. (1989) Autism, Asperger's syndrome and semantic-pragmatic disorder: Where are the boundaries? ''British Journal of Disorders of Communication. Department of Psychology, University of Manchester Vol. 24, pp. 107-121. and began to wonder if ''I struggled with pragmatic inference. I approached my doctor in mid-2015, tentatively asking for a referral for an autism diagnosis. The doctor handed me a sheet of paper (the AQ10) with a 10-part checklist on it, and asked me to complete and return it. A few months later, I received a letter in the post. Apparently, there was no funding available for people with my sort of checklist scores. I put the letter in the bin, cried, then pushed it to the back of my mind. It wasn't until October 2016 that I finally got an officially recognised answer to so many of my questions. The report I received was filled with comments on my interactional (in)abilities, either those observed in two sessions or those retold by my mother during the development history session. Here is one of the many excerpts which stood out to me: Helen did engage in some repetitive commentary and Janet recalls an incident when an innocuous comment about not eating too many sweets because she would get fat became internalised by Helen. Helen went onto develop eating difficulties in later life and Janet attributed the origins of these difficulties to internalised core beliefs and literal interpretations of statements. Helen became fixated upon this statement and repeated it for the entire day and this went on into subsequent days. Admittedly, I was only young when this incident occurred, but I feel there is a point to be made about how, even though language is something ubiquitous and freely used, we still must remain aware of how we use it around children. I have had an eating disorder for the past 6 years of my life and, while I am by no means claiming that this is solely down to language, it most certainly plays a large role in my relationship with my body. The diagnostic process was actually the inspiration for my Attitudes to Language essay, because in the report, I found such excerpts as these: Janet states that Helen would engage formally with other children and once introduced herself to other children “Hello I’m Helen I’m five years young”. Janet reports that Helen had many verbal rituals and would read books repetitively, and she would often ask Janet to say something over and over again. All of Helen’s responses to the assessor were appropriate and varied according to the social situation and presses. With regard to non-verbal overtures, Helen laughed and smiled at appropriate times to get, maintain or direct the assessor’s attention. Overall, Helen used a range of verbal and non-verbal behaviours to induce reciprocal communication however she did not enquire further about the assessor’s experiences or thoughts. All of these, and more, offer some personal insight into how people perceive me based on my linguistic and conversational abilities. “Language use is a large part of an autism diagnosis, as autism is classed as a “communication disorder” (i.e. dis-orderly communication) but it is important to note that disorder is often only disorderly as compared with what is (considered to be) the normAttwood, H. (2016a) How is autistic language use represented in public discourse? Unpublished manuscript.”. Dissertation My experiences as both a linguist and an autist led me to the logical conclusion that an appropriate dissertation topic would be autism. I began with the intention of investigating other-initiated repair by autistic individuals, but as I picked through my data, I realised it was not necessarily the repair I was interested in, but the reasons behind it – misconstruals. I was interested in recipients' interpretations of utterances, rather than speakers' productions of them, because I know from personal experience that there have been many times I know I have misconstrued someone, but have chosen not to initiate repair.